


The Long Way

by cyren2132



Series: The Long Way [1]
Category: Terminator (Movies)
Genre: Dreams, Gen, Memories, Yuletide 2016
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 12:10:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8890291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyren2132/pseuds/cyren2132
Summary: Pops took the long way to meet Sarah and Kyle in 2017, relying on his time with her to navigate the years separating them.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [boywonder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boywonder/gifts).



**C:\ >datetime.cmd**  
**Current time is 07/12/1985:05:00:00.00**  
  
**RUN: WAKEUP <HEALTH CHECK>**  
  
Pops opened his eyes.  He looked at his arm, letting his sensors travel across the fresh pink skin that was continuing to grow and attach itself further down his forearm. The skin across his cheek had completed months ago, but by his estimation the arm would take at least six more to extend into the hand and wrap around the fingers. A jacket and glove could hide the damage. But this was July. A jacket and glove would add even more conspicuousness to his already large and imposing frame. The best course of action, Pops realized, was to let it continue to heal.  
  
**RUN: DREAM <Range: Any>**  
“Pops, do you dream?” Sarah asked. She had been walking the aisle of shelves holding shabby paperback novels, running her fingers across the spines until she stopped at a thin blue book and held it up to him. “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” was written in fat white letters on its cover.  
  
“No.” He plucked the book from her hands and added it to their collection. Sarah was 14 now and, they’d only just settled again after the T-1000 discovered their previous location.  
  
“But could you? Mrs. Harris said dreams are a way of unpacking all our thoughts and remembering things we need to remember.” Mrs. Harris was Sarah’s favorite teacher, and once she had time to think about everything they’d left behind, she had been crushed to realize that — once again — she wouldn’t finish a school year. And then she’d insisted they visit the book store so she could keep learning and have things to do.  
  
“I already remember everything.”  
  
“Yeah, but it still takes time to pull up those files, right? If you dreamed, couldn’t some of them be closer to the surface or triggered by new information or something?”  
  
Pops processed her words. If he chose, he could access any file in his databanks in a fraction of a second, but there was something to the idea of cycling through old files and tagging them for auto recall in certain situations. And the command would be easy to create and execute.  
  
“I do not dream, Sarah Connor,” he said again. “But I could.”

* * *

  
**C:\ >datetime.cmd**  
**Current time is 05/28/1992:05:00:00.00**  
  
**RUN: WAKEUP**  
  
Pops opened his eyes. A quick scan of the room showed everything as he had left it while he ‘slept’ and an even faster internal review showed no anomalies in the area while he was in low power mode.  
  
**RUN SUBROUTINE: HYGIENE**  
  
**HAIR:** ACCEPTABLE  
**SKIN:** ACCEPTABLE  
**TEETH:** UNNACCEPTABLE  
  
Pops opened the small medicine cabinet and pulled out a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. Squeezing - _gently_ ,  Sarah’s voice ran through his processors - a small dab of white paste streaked in green and red spilled onto his red plastic toothbrush and Pops began the circular motions he’d taught Sarah for healthy dental hygiene.  
  
As his internal timer counted down from two minutes, he reviewed the previous evenings logs.  
  
**Work.**  
**Lunch Break.**  
**Clock Out.**  
**Interaction: Dennis Stevens >>Bowling**  
  
That was it. The squat man with patchy stubble approached him as he was leaving the construction site.  
  
“Hey, Bob!” he called out jovially. “Edwards dropped out of bowling tonight. We need another player; you in?”  
  
An audio file played in his head.  
  
_You should interact more with people. It’ll make you seem more human._  
  
“Yes.”  
  
That night, Pops had gone to the bowling alley with his workmates, who all marveled at his ability to hit strike after strike.  
  
“Goddamn Bobby,” one of them said. “Are you sure you didn’t go pro in your younger days?”  
  
“I did not go pro.”  
  
After — and during — the game, the group had ordered copious amounts of food and beer. Fortunately, Pops had the required systems to intake and output the material, so he was able to avoid suspicion, though a few did marvel at his ability to walk straight — and bowl better — after a few beers.  
  
But when he returned home, the hour of the night was triggering his sleep program, encouraged by Sarah herself, and it warred with the subroutine that told him to brush his teeth after the event, eventually losing out. It was something Pops realized he would have to fix. After all, it would not help his mission to acquire cavities.  
  
Pops — or as these people knew him, Bob Conners — was a construction worker building strip malls in Arizona. He didn’t need the work or the money. But he needed experience. He needed practice. Not at building homes, retail centers or office buildings — he could pull up the proper techniques, the best blueprints, a list of the required tools in an instant and be done with construction of an entire building in a fraction of the time it would take an entire team of workers.  
  
But, as Sarah had reminded him on multiple occasions, he was not good with people. And so, he worked. He mingled. He tried to fit in. Sometimes he was successful. Other times, he was not.  
  
But it all served a purpose. It built him a background and legitimacy in the industry, so that when construction of the Cyberdyne lab began, he could be in on the ground floor, not trying to make good impressions to get hired off the street.  
  
Once his teeth were brushed, he returned to his closet, dressed for the day, made a lunch he didn’t need, and grabbed his hard hat, heading for the door.

* * *

  
**C:\ >datetime.cmd**  
**Current time is 06/10/1999:18:34:23.04**  
  
The foreman was late. No one else at the site seemed to mind. They all milled around a small coffee pot, drinking the hot liquid from paper cups. It was illogical, given how much of their day was spent under the blazing sun. Instead, he filled a cup of water from the fountain and joined them. Well, stood near them. Conversation slowed to nothing as he took his place leaning against the wall. He’d noticed he had that affect on people.  
  
The door of the small trailer burst open, and the foreman — the too young son of the company’s owner, given a job he was ill-equipped to handle — rushed in spilling papers from his hands as he came.  
  
“Hey guys, it’s that time of year again!” he said as he held the colorful fliers in the air. Half the room groaned. Pops cocked his head. It was June. And he wasn’t sure what made these two seconds different from the two before. The foreman began handing out the fliers. Pops tapped the man next to him on the shoulder.  
  
“What time of year is it?” he whispered as the man — Parker — leaned close.  
  
“It’s ‘Work 60 Hours A Week of Manual Labor and Then Spend Our Free Time Volunteering With Organizations We Could Care Less About To Make The Company Look Good’ Month,” he said.  
  
Pops’ brow crinkled as he processed the words.  
  
“That title seems counterproductive,” he said. “And grammatically incorrect.” Parker stared at him for a second. Pops read the look as something approaching incredulous.  
  
“Conners, anybody ever tell you you’re an odd duck?”  
  
_AmazingAssholeAwesomeBadassBuiltCoolCreepyCuteDangerousFabulousFantasticGiantGinormousHerculeanHomelyHoneyIncredibleInfiltrator_  
_KillerMachineMetalMoronMountain **Odd** QuietScumbagStrangeSweetieTerminatorUgly_  
  
“That is a new one on me,” he said trying out a phrase he’d heard a few weeks ago. Parker chuckled at the answer.  
  
“Funny, too” he said as he turned his attention back to the foreman and Pops filed the new words into his system.  
  
“Here’s the list of organizations we’re working with this year,” the foreman said as he passed the papers around. “We got a late start, but as always, for every 8 hours you volunteer between now and July 4, you can receive half a paid vacation day. This initiative is very important to my f- to the company, and I expect to see at least half of you out among the people…”  
  
Pops diverted his attention from the foreman’s chatter to inspect the papers when they came his way. Organizations from adult day cares to food banks and the public zoo were all listed. Some had photographs, and it was one of these that caught his eye. Three kittens, one gray tabby, one black, and one orange and white stared up at him.  
  
Noah’s Ark Animal Shelter needed volunteers.

* * *

  
**C:\ >datetime.cmd**  
**Current time is 06/10/1999:21:30:00.00**  
  
**RUN:DREAM <Range: September1975-May1984>**  
The wind picked up. Sprinkles were just beginning to fall when a high-pitched cry stopped Sarah in her tracks.  
  
“Did you hear that?” Sarah asked.  
  
“Yes.” The cry came again  
  
“Pops, it’s a kitten!” Sarah said as her eyes scanned the sidewalk, roads and alley before stopping at a drainage grate at the curb. The mewing became more persistent as she approached, one shrill cry after another as she laid her body down on the sidewalk and hung her head over the curb, peering into the pipes below. “Here kitty,” she called, but the kitten only mewed more. “Pops, I can’t see it,” she said, and before he could answer, she’d reached her arm into the hole.  
  
“Sarah Connor, that is filthy,” Pops said.  
  
“Try being the kitten.” She pulled her arm back out and stood up with a huff. “I can’t reach it, either. See if you can see it.”  
  
Pops pursed his lips and crinkled his eyes in an attempt to match an expression known as mild annoyance and crouched at the grate.  
  
“There is a pipe on the left wall,” he said. The feline has crawled inside.”  
  
“Can you reach it?”  
  
Pops stretched out against the curb and stuck his hand in, missing the bottom by a considerable amount, as he knew he would.  
  
“I can’t reach it,” Pops said as he stood. A crack of thunder and flash of lightning filled the air. “Let’s go home.”  
  
“We can’t just leave it!” Sarah said. “Look at this rain; it’ll drown!” Indeed, fat drops had begun to fall from the sky, leaving wet trails along Pops’ jacket and streaking across the sullied fabric of Sarah’s shirt.  
  
“The feline’s safety is not our concern,” Pops said. “The T-1000-”  
  
“Hasn’t been around in weeks,” Sarah finished as she spun on her heel, stopping in front of him and placing a hand on his forearm. “If we don’t help it, it’ll die.” She had several more inches to grow and as the rain weighed down her hair and clothes she looked nothing short of scrawny.  
  
“Sarah Connor, we need to go home-”  
  
“It’ll _**die**_ ,” Sarah said again, and in that moment she possessed all the strength and perseverance she would ever need to prepare John Connor for his role in the future. “We _**have**_ to help it.”  
  
“Very well.”  
  
All told, rescuing the kitten took four hours and included Pops lifting the drainage grate and dangling Sarah by her ankles into the hole only to have the crying kitten scurry farther down its pipe. The rain was pounding down on them as Sarah noticed the manhole cover several feet away. Its entrance was larger than the small drainage hole, and once Pops had removed the manhole cover and lowered Sarah into the hole, she had room to crouch down and peer into the pipe as the kittens nonstop cries echoed out, catching the attention of passersby.  
  
“Come here, kitty,” Sarah’s voice echoed up from the hole. “Come on out; it’s okay.” The kitten remained in its pipe. A man approached, and Pops was wary at first, keeping one hand just out of sight and within easy reach of the 9mm secured in his waistband. But the man just extended an umbrella and stood close enough to cover Pops and the hole that was beginning to pool with water.  
  
“The things we do for our kids, yeah?” the man said around a cigarette. Pops nodded but kept a hard eye on the  grandmotherly woman that stepped forward next. Pops tensed as she reached into her purse, but relaxed again as she pulled out a sandwich bag.  
  
“Sweetheart why don’t you try this,” she called down as she dropped the sandwich into Sarah’s hands.  
  
“Thanks!” Sarah called out. Pops could hear the bag opening and scent receptors picked up the smell of tuna fish. Sarah called for the cat again and went silent for a moment before calling out to him.  
  
“Pops, I’ve got him!” she yelled as she reached one arm heavenward. The crowd clapped and cheered as he pulled her up, a small orange and white kitten tucked against her chest, happily eating a chunk of tuna. Fully in the wind and the rain again, Sarah had begun to shiver, and Pops draped his jacket over her and reached for the kitten. It dug its front claws into her shirt as he pulled, stretching itself to its full length to not lose contact.  
  
“Oh, it’s just like a little piece of taffy,” Tuna Woman said with a smile as Pops returned the cat to Sarah. Sarah couldn’t help but grin.  
  
“Looks like you’ve got a cat now, friend,” the man with the umbrella said as people began to disperse. And he wasn’t wrong. Taking a cue from Tuna Woman, Sarah named the kitten Taffy. Taffy was with them for four years, a cuddly companion for Sarah who had nothing but love to give and only caused problems during the stress of moving. Unfortunately, being on the run from a liquid-metal terminator meant moving quite a bit, and it was one night — a night that almost claimed Sarah’s little Taffy-cat — that had her rethinking their situation.  
  
At their next stop, she befriended the neighbors. There were two girls near her age in the house, but Sarah was drawn to family’s son, Enrique, a chunky adolescent who played soccer at his mother’s insistence but whose heart belonged to the shooting range. Sarah’s knowledge of firearms impressed him, and they were thick as thieves in a matter of weeks. Pops was fairly certain Enrique had been Sarah’s first kiss, and he knew he’d heard her whispering in his ear about a future war with machines. He had intended to stop her and insist she tell the him that she had made it up, but Pops only had to look at him once to know Enrique Salceda believed every word and would never betray Sarah Connor.  
  
And that was why, when they were forced to leave again, Sarah left Taffy in Enrique’s arms, giving them both tearful goodbyes before slipping away under the cover of darkness.  
  
That was the night Sarah Connor decided to stop running. At 16, she threw herself into their work, learning everything she could about weapons, terminators and the future. Two years later, she had a plan.  
  
And two years after that, they met Kyle Reese.

* * *

 

 **C:\ >datetime.cmd**  
**Current time is 04/19/2011:16:15:42.37**

The Cyberdyne lab was being built. Most of the workers didn’t really know or care what it was. Just another computer company in a city of computer companies that all used the same steel, concrete and glass. But Pops knew better.

He hadn’t known precisely when construction would begin — not since the timeline had been altered to move Skynet’s takeover from 1997 to 2017 — but adjusting the information he had 20 years into the future gave him a good idea. And so Pops had spent the past 25 years working his way across New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California — even a brief stint in Nevada — before establishing himself in San Francisco.

His interactions with people had improved, bolstered by time on the job and social interactions. And so, when he stepped off the elevator at his apartment building, he had little difficulty with the scene before him. A small cat was racing down the hallway while a flustered woman stood half in, half out of her apartment, a leaking bag of garbage dripping in her hands.

“No!” she yelled after the cat before looking to Pops. “Can you catch him?!” With ease, he reached down and scooped up the small animal, holding it in his arm and even giving it a gentle scratch behind the ear until she reached him and dropped the trash down the garbage chute.

“Thank you!” she sighed. She took the cat from him and held it close to her face. “You are a very bad kitty!” she said with a scolding tone that was betrayed by the snuggle she gave it after. “Thank you,” she said again to Pops. “Hi, I’m Carol; sorry, I don’t always look like this.”

Carol looked to be a little older than Sarah — maybe 25 — in a gray T-shirt with brown hair that threatened to escape the hair tie holding it back.

The comment puzzled Pops.

 **RUN:SMALLTALK**  
“It’s nice to meet you,” Pops said. “I’m Bob. Are you new in the building?”

“Yeah, I just signed the lease yesterday. Turns out the previous tenant left quite the mess between the time I saw it and the time I got it, hence all of this.” She waved a from head to toe and nodded to the garbage chute. Ah. She had been cleaning, Pops deduced, and usually looked as though she had not.

“Who is your friend?” Pops asked as he ran a hand down the cat’s back.

“This little escape artist is Bastian,” Carol answered.

 **MEMORY TRIGGER 213**  
**DATE: 02/03/74**  
“Pops, read me a story.”

“You know how to read, Sarah Connor”

“But I like it better when you do it.”

She handed Pops a book. The cover called it  
“The Neverending Story” - the tale of Bastian and Atreyu,  
two boys trying to save the magical world of Fantastica.

“This title is impossible, Sarah Connor.  
The story must end when the pages do.”

Sarah rolled her eyes.

“Pleeeaaaase, Pops.”

“Hello, Bastian,” Pops said to the cat. He stopped short of trying to smile at it, but he’d noticed many humans treat their pets as if they themselves were small humans, too. He turned back to Carol. “It was nice to meet you. Welcome to the building.” She smiled at him as they both proceeded to their own doors, and Pops filed the meeting away as a successful social interaction.

* * *

 

 **C:\ >datetime.cmd**  
**Current time is 04/22/2011:06:45:22.20**  
Everyone arrived to work early that day. They wanted to leave early to have a longer holiday weekend, and Pops didn’t understand how they could so fondly celebrate the resurrection of their deity — known as the Prince of Peace in human form, a man known for his generosity — and still be so inconsiderate to the newest worker.

Thomas was 19. At the moment, there wasn’t much he was permitted to do. Carrying things mostly. But the other men weren’t shy about using his limited function for their own needs, coercing him to run errands and do personal favors. On this day, they’d ordered him to make a coffee run.

“Sorry,” Thomas said. “I’m running low on gas-”

“Take a company truck,” one of the workmen — Mike — said. He held out a set of keys. Thomas looked from the keys to the fleet of company vehicles and then to his own dusty, beat-up maroon hatchback before pulling his own keys from his pocket and heading to his car.

“Hey, kid, I told you to take a company car.”

“I can’t drive stick.”

Something about the comment had the other men bursting into gales of laughter. Pops didn’t see the humor is someone lacking a skill, and the defeated way that Thomas’s shoulders drooped implied a hurtfulness to the situation. Bob took the keys and headed after him.

“Aw, come on, Bob, don’t take pity on him!” One of the men reached for his arm, and something about the action registered in his circuitry as a threat. Pops turned, twisting the assailant’s arm with one hand and using the other to grab him by the shirt and raise him off the ground.

“Whoa, hey, Bob! What are you doing?!” The men had surrounded him, Thomas came running back and Pops had already identified three methods of termination before mission parameters overrode the action. Killing the man would get him fired. Getting fired would compromise his ability to help Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese stop Skynet. Not stopping Skynet would lead to Judgment Day in approximately 6.45 years.

Pops lowered the man and looked him square in the eye.

“Black with two sugars?” he asked.

“Yeah,” the man said through a pained breath as he rubbed at his arm and flexed his fingers. Pops looked to the other men in the group.

“Two creamers, one sugar; black; double mocha, no whipped cream; large half-caffeinated almond-milk latte with four pumps vanilla syrup and an extra half shot of espresso?”

One by one, the men nodded and Pops turned to Thomas, nudging him toward the company truck.

“We’ll be back.”

* * *

**C:\ >datetime.cmd**  
**Current time is 04/22/2011:19:31:16.24**  
Pops entered the bunker and left his lunchbox and tool belt by the door before depositing two large packages on a nearby work table and grabbing a box cutter. Judging by the size and weight, one would be the majority of the parts required to assemble two AR-15s and another would be a large box of ammunition.

The bunker was filling up nicely. Pops had amassed a small collection of weaponry during his time in other states and spread it among a variety of drop-sites, but the ability to have it mostly all in one location made organization and upkeep easier. He still had a couple offfsite caches, but this was by far the most complete collection.

As Pops put away his latest additions and began the task of cleaning the arsenal, he reviewed the earlier day and began a diagnostics test to determine what had triggered such a violent outburst at the work site. He was midway through the collection when the test finished. It turned up no anomalies in his programming, no degraded circuitry, just a brief instance of the T-1000 grabbing him similarly during a fight, but more often there were memories of Sarah reaching out to stop him from doing something she disapproved of.

It was indeed a curious reaction, but with no underlying cause that he could detect, Pops had no choice but to file the incident away in his “really weird shit folder” as Sarah had once called it and carry on. And so Pops turned his attention to review of the day’s social interactions.

His time with Thomas could no doubt be filed as a positive. In a company truck, he drove the boy to a coffee shop, explaining the mechanics of manual transmission as they went. On the way back to the worksite, Pops took the passenger seat, offering occasional assistance on the drive back.  
The other men were another story. Though Pops thought he had recovered well from his initial interaction, they remained distant for the remainder of the day and none of his attempts to ease their tension were successful.

**Interaction: Workmates >>Atonement>>Unsuccessful**

When Pops was finished with his work, he stopped at a small table. Sarah’s cassette player sat atop it, along with other knick-knacks and trinkets that could easily be fit in pockets as they ran. And taped to the wall above were several pictures she had drawn of them in her youth and photographs tracking their time together. Pops wasn’t entirely sure why he kept them all, other than perhaps Sarah would like to see them again when she arrived. Propped against the wall was a small ID card. The fake driver’s license he’d made for Sarah once she’d proven she could safely operate a vehicle.

It took him 0.03 seconds to access her first driving experience.

* * *

**RUN: FILE REVIEW <Range: 12/23/1976><Tag: Vehicle; Tag: T-1000>**  
“Take the wheel.”

“What?!”

“Drive.”

Sarah was 12. She’d never driven before, but she was smart. Pops trusted that she wouldn’t send them crashing straight into a brick wall, at any rate. And Pops had other things to deal with. With cruise control set, he leaned out the window and aimed his shotgun at the car behind them. The truck wavered and his first shot missed. Careful not to jostle Sarah, he climbed out the window and into the truck bed so she could slide behind the wheel.

“Hands at 10 and 2, Sarah Connor.”

“O-okay.” Her voice shook with fear, but the truck stayed steady as Pops aimed and fired again, this time catching the speeding sports car just right to send it tail over nose. It was too close. The vehicle would have crashed into them had Sarah not swerved into the other lane as the sports car skidded and tumbled past. But in that moment, a string of liquid metal spurted from the cracked window and wrapped like tendrils around the truckbed’s hand rails. And with Pops thrown off balance from the swerve, that was all the T-1000 needed to pull the rest of itself aboard and reform. He pulled a handgun from his waist and fired 10 quick shots, hitting it center-mass and pushing it nearly over the edge. One more blast with the shotgun would have sent it over the edge, but a bump in the road sent both of them sprawling into the bed. From there it was a grappling match, and — sophisticated piece of machinery that he was — Pops was still no match for liquid metal in hand-to-hand combat.

The T-1000 tossed him from one side of the truck to another, slamming his head against the toolbox and the wheel wells, with each crash causing the truck to fishtail from one direction to the other. It had him down. Its arms were raised to finish him, but before it could strike, Pops wrapped his fingers around the truck’s tire iron and swung. He caught the T-1000 in its middle, and with a glub the tire iron sunk into its torso. It looked down on him in surprise, and Pops rose, swinging up as he did until the metal rod came out the top of the T-1000’s head, bisecting it.

“Hang on, Pops!” Sarah yelled.

Sarah made a hard right, turning onto a bridge. Pops wasn’t even sure if her foot grazed the brake pedal as she did it, and the momentum threw the T-1000 over the edge. The truck swerved from left to right, banging into guard rails on either side as Sarah tried to regain control, and one silvery tendril clung to the side of the truck. It grew in thickness as the T-1000 tried to defy gravity, sliding in rivulets back up itself as the bulk of its mass fell. Pops recovered his shotgun and fired, separating the tendril from the rest of the machine. It flopped into the truck bed, slithering around like a shining eel before Pops grabbed an old coffee can long forgotten in truck bed and turned it over, trapping it. The bit of liquid metal shot from side to side, pinging against the sides of the can with such force that Pops wasn’t entirely sure it couldn’t bust through.

“Keep driving,” he told Sarah through the small window separating the cabin from the truck bed.

The farther they drove, the calmer the metal got. Such was the way of liquid metal machines — the components, when in close proximity could still be controlled by the main processor — moving, listening, transmitting -- but distance stifled its connection until soon it was little more than a puddle of metallic goo.

“Apply your brake gently and pull in here,” Pops said as they neared an old, abandoned gas station.

Once they were stopped, Pops hopped out of the back of the truck and carried the coffee can and their bag of weapons behind the small garage that was attached the station. Sarah grabbed their bags and took them into the small station’s office and returned to the truck for Taffy, pulling her small carrier from the floorboards and whispering reassurances as she took the cat inside and filled small bowls with water and food. Once the cat was settled, Sarah joined Pops behind the station.

Pops had just finished digging a hole in the sand. The coffee can sat nearby beneath a heavy rock — just in case. Sarah walked up as he lowered the can into the hole and sprinkled thermite powder over it.

“You did very well,” he said.

“You mean the part where I almost ran us off a bridge,” Sarah said glumly.

“But we did not go over the edge,” Pops said. He rummaged through his jacket pockets until he pulled out a book of matches. “Though, in general you want to slow into a turn and speed out of it.” Pops lit the matches and dropped the book into the hole. Flames and sparks flew out as the sound of screeching metal filled the air - the death knell of a small piece of the T-1000.

“Did we lose it?” Sarah asked.

“The T-1000 will anticipate subterfuge,” Pops continued. “It would expect us to seek alternate routes. Acquire a new vehicle. Double back. We have not done those things, so that’s a point in our favor. We may rest here a few hours before continuing on.”

They stood there together for several moments. As the fire began to die down, Pops took his shovel — liberated from a store room in the garage -- and began to pile sand back on the embers. It was then that Sarah spoke.

“Will we always be running from it Pops?”

“We are not running from it now,” Pops said. “Nor when we reach a new location.”

“You know what I mean,” Sarah answered. “Will it always be hunting us?”

Pops considered the question as he smoothed the ground where the hole had been.

“No, Sarah Connor,” he said. He nodded to the spot on the ground. “If necessary, we will take it apart piece by piece.”

She shivered and leaned into him as he wrapped an arm around her small frame and led her inside.

* * *

**C:\ >datetime.cmd**  
**Current time is 12/10/2014:08:17:09.19**  
The Cyberdyne lab was expanding. Daniel Dyson’s research had leapt forward and the company had rehired Pops’ firm to create a wing just for his work. It included an underground bunker billed as a tornado shelter, but Pops didn’t need to have a lifetime of weather reports stored in his head to know that tornaodoes were not a huge threat in Northern California. Nor did he need a human understanding of empathy to see the ridiculousness of protecting such a shelter with cutting edge alarms and biometric screening.

This was a bomb shelter. A safe haven for the war. Time was running out.

Pops was sitting at the work table in his bunker; a slab of modeling clay sat next to him. He pulled a chunk forward, flattened it out and began carving the loops, swirls and lines of Sarah’s hand print. It shouldn’t have taken so much clay, but eight times now, he’d gotten between 40 and 83 percent finished when his hand twitched or froze, ruining the delicate work. Each chunk of clay was good for about two efforts before it couldn’t be salvaged.

His components were aging. Forty-one years, while a blip in the lifetime of his power cell and processors, was a long time for a T-800 to be on essentially nonstop active duty, and the mechanics of his endoskeleton and peripherals were succumbing to to the lack of available maintenance. But the work had been necessary. He had to prepare this time for the arrival of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese.

So, he tried again, this time stopping at predetermined times to give his servos a chance to rest while he walked the bunker and checked his own makeshift lab for the dish of flesh that was slowly growing. It would need to double in size before Pops could cut it into the shape of her hand. If his calculations and prediction for time left with the clay were correct, the skin should be reach adequate size a few days after the hand print was finished. Then it would just be a matter of laying the silicone to create ridges, shaving it down to the appropriate depth and pressing the skin into it.

Pops had no doubt Terminator skin would be fascinating to today’s scientists. Though it possessed human DNA — and once complete, would read as 100 percent human in lab tests — it wasn’t. And its early stages left it malleable and primed for accepting artificial fingerprints to make up for the lack of organic, friction-made prints formed in the womb. A polymer hand, padded and with a heat source was the final step.

He had hoped to have the process completed months ago. Walking the site with a human-looking hand in his lunchbox would have been less conspicuous in October than December, but rumors of layoffs had hit early this year, and a portion of the men had slowed their work to a crawl, hoping to keep their job through the winter holidays. The shelter had only been complete for a few weeks, and the biometric scanner for a few days.  
But that was enough time. Pops would just have to take more care as he entered the area, pressed the hand to the display and whispered Sarah’s name in a voice that wasn’t his own.

* * *

**C:\ >datetime.cmd**  
**Current time is 10/11/2017:03:21:04.47**  
**RUN: DREAM <PREDICTIVE SCENARIOS>**

Sarah and Kyle arrived in a flash of light and electricity. The time displacement bubble sheared away a portion of an SUV. A quick scan as Pops passed showed the driver would live. They were huddled together on the highway when Pops pulled up and opened the passenger door.

“Get in.”

Police had not yet arrived, and they were able to flee the scene with only one vehicle following them. Pops lost it relatively quickly, and soon they were at the bunker, gathering their arsenal and preparing to storm Cyberdyne and stop Genisys. Stop Skynet.

Getting past security was a simple matter. Setting the charges even moreso. The only oddity of their mission was an image that kept appearing on Pops’ peripheral. A faceless phantom that seemed like a man should be there but never was when Pops turned his head. But whatever it was didn’t stop them from their work.

Sarah and Kyle were placing the last charge while Pops stood guard at the top of the steps leading to their catwalk.

“I wouldn’t put that there,” a voice called out. Pops, Sarah ad Kyle all trained their weapons in its direction. “Whoa, hey, easy guys. I’m just trying to help.” It was a man’s voice, distorted in a way that Pops couldn’t recognize. Like two voices slightly overlapping each other. The man slowly stepped from the shadows with his hands raised to his shoulders, open and facing the three of them. There must have been something wrong with Pops’ visual sensors, because where a face should have been was just a pale spot, like someone had smudged a wet painting with their thumb. The man kept his slow approach, and it was Reese who spoke first.

“John,” he breathed before lowering his weapon and walking forward, meeting him in the middle of the catwalk. They had just embraced when Pops’ visuals cleared and he saw John Connor standing among them.

“Hey, Dad,” John said with an impish grin, and that was when Pops’ scanners saw something else. Reese was in the way. Pops didn’t have a clean shot.

“Wait!” he yelled. “It’s a Ter--”

John’s smile turned cruel with one swipe, he’d sent Reese over the railing.

“No!” Sarah yelled. She unloaded shot after shot into John, but they passed through him like nothing as he stalked toward her. Pops tried to run to them, but he had only taken five steps before his left knee locked, dropping him to the grated floor. He banged on the joint. He could hear the servos whirring over the sound of Sarah’s handgun, but nothing moved.

Sarah was out of ammunition. She threw her handgun at John, and he easily swatted it away as she turned to run. The look on her face was pure fear.

“Pops!”

She ran to him but tripped, falling face-first into the grate. John was right behind her. Pops raised his shotgun, but he wasn’t fast enough. John hauled her to her feet and held her close with one hand around her neck.

“Sorry, Mom,” John said. There was something perverse about the way his breath fluttered the strands of hair that had escaped her tie. “But I can’t let you do this. Genisys has to be born. Skynet must live. It’s the only way to save the human race.”

“Pops,” Sarah whispered. “Help me.”

He had a shot. One pull of the trigger would take John’s head off. His finger refused to budge. John looked up sharply at him. One corner of his mouth raised in a cocky smile, and with one arm still wrapped tightly around Sarah, he wagled one finger of the other in the air and pointed at Pops. Pops was frozen as black threads extended and multiplied, invading Pops’ eyes, nose, mouth and ears, drowning his programming. Remaking him.

“POPS!”

* * *

**C:\ >datetime.cmd**  
**Current time is 10/11/2017:03:23:17.52**  
**RUN: WAKEUP <SECURITY ALERT>**  
Pops opened his eyes before the last crash had finished and raised his weapon, immediately beginning a search of the apartment. The edges of his visual display were fuzzy, but not enough to impede his search. Silently, he went from room to room. He located the source of the security alert in the kitchen and set his weapon the counter before staring sternly at the floor.

“You are a very bad kitty,” he said.

An orange tabby cat blinked up at him. The whiskers on one cheek twitched before it returned its attention to the treats it had knocked from the counter and spilled onto the floor. Pops reached down and picked the large cat up. It squeaked in indignation before settling with its front paws resting on his shoulder and its back legs in the crook of his arm. It rubbed its face against his cheek and nuzzled his neck as a low rumbling purr filled Pops’ auditory sensors.

Pops carried the cat to the couch. On the way, his visual display sharpened and a lingering stiffness in his trigger finger disappeared. The therapeutic effects of the purr had been one of the perks to adopting Julius. The frequency was just right for a temporary recalibration of his mechanics.

He had never intended to acquire a pet. The work he’d done at local animal shelters was just to establish a presence and practice blending in a pre-Judgment Day world. Because Kyle Reese had been right. Blending to infiltrate a Resistance base was much different than blending to live in the world.

He’d been volunteering twice a month at the San Francisco shelter for years, and Julius has been there for almost as long as he had. Judging him unadoptable at 9 years old, the shelter director set a euthanization date. One of the few phone calls he’d received in Sarah’s absence was from one of the tearful workers.

“I’m just calling to let you know that Julius is scheduled to be put down next week,” she said. “He’s just too slow to warm up to people, but I’ve seen the two of you together and wanted to say that if you wanted to adopt him, time was running out.”

 **MEMORY TRIGGER 3204**  
**DATE: 11/2/1975**  
_“It’ll **die.** We **have** to help it.”_

Adopting seemed like something Sarah would do, and so it’s what Pops did. And now he gently stroked the cat’s back with his free hand until Julius had enough and crawled off him, settling next to him on the couch — half in the crack between the cushions with his back pressed firmly into Pops’ leg — and began to sleep.

While Julius slept, Pops reviewed his own interrupted dream. As Sarah’s arrival neared and he began to realize his current limitations, Pop tweaked his dream program to closely examine all the things that could go wrong so he could plan to avoid them. But this particular dream initially seemed so far from the realm of possibility that it merited a closer look.

It would be at least 40 years — 2057 — before John Connor would be a man of that age. And the possibility of him being a Terminator seemed very remote. Something must have triggered the program to consider it. Working backward, he began to review his files.

Three weeks ago he had been on his way to see a man about a weapon he couldn’t purchase through the mail. His auditory sensors picked up a fragment of sound — the latter half of a “thank you” — that made him turn on his heel. A man whose general physique and hair matched the faceless entity in his dream was turning away from a taco stand. Pops had not seen enough of his face to run a scan, but when the man walked away — joined by a black man Pops also had not been able to get a clean view for facial recognition — Pops began to follow. He hadn’t made it very far before three dogs on leashes tethered to the belt of a a pimple-faced boy lunged at him, causing a scene.

Pops lost the men in the commotion and had little choice but to go on with his day. The odds were slim that the voice he’d heard had been anything more than coincidence, and his preparation for Sarah was in its final stages and required his full attention. But his subroutines must have been working in the background, crunching numbers and shunting them to his dream program while he purchased explosives and clothing.

Because if one of those men had been Daniel Dyson and the other had been John Connor, their mission would be that much more difficult. His program must have breezed through their entrance at the lab in order to focus on the salient prediction. John Connor was compromised.

Pops looked down at Julius. As odds of surviving the mission decreased, he realized the likelihood of leaving Julius alone increased. And even if Pops survived, there was no telling what life would be like for the 15-pound cat. And so Pops made a decision that might have been difficult for a human, but seemed the only logical choice for a Terminator turned Guardian.

It was a Wednesday. Pops stood, packed a bag and waited for 7 a.m., a time he knew his neighbor Carol would be awake, drinking her second cup of coffee before work. Pops picked up Julius, grabbed the bag and went to her door.

“Hey, Bob,” she said as she answered. “Are you okay?”

“No,” Pops answered. “I have a family emergency and must leave town for a while. Could you watch Julius for me, please?”

“Yeah, that’s no problem,” Carol said immediately. She lifted Julius from Pops’ arms with a grunt. “Come here, you big baby,” she said to the cat before turning back to Pops. “Is this about your daughter?”

“Yes,” Pops said. Over the years, Pops’ small talk with Carol had become actual conversations, and he had invented a story about an estranged child attending college back east. Carol looked sympathetically at him.

“I hope everything works out for you,” Carol said. “And don’t you worry about us at all,” she continued, holding Julius close to her face and rubbing her nose against his. “We’ll have tons of fun, won’t we Julius.” The cat let out a soft _Mrrrer_ as Carol turned him to face Pops and gently waved one paw in the air. “Say ‘bye-bye, Daddy,’” she cooed.

The corner of Pops’ mouth ticked up. Perhaps it was a lingering purr effect. He scratched behind the cat’s ear one last time.

“Goodbye Julius,” he said before walking away, leaving the cat in Carol’s arms and a bag of supplies at her feet, confident that if didn’t return — and he had no intention to — that Julius would be well loved and cared for.

His next stop was the bunker. All of his tools were there, and he wanted to do one last check to make sure the vehicle was in prime condition. As he popped the hood, he set a timer for Sarah and Kyle’s arrival. The numbers ticked down by hundredths of a second in the top right corner of his visual display.

10:26:42.31

10:26:42.30

10:26:42.29

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Boywonder: Thank you for the prompts! I hope this gift is what you wanted it to be. Also, I originally had a much more permanent end for Sarah and Kyle in Pops' last dream, but I didn't want to run afoul of you DNWs. If dream deaths are different from "real deaths" and you'd like to see how that scene originally was penned, let me know and I can either edit it in or add it as a bonus chapter. If not, I'm still happy with the way it turned out.
> 
> 2\. Nobody take driving lessons from The Terminator. Hands at 10 and 2 was a good rule for the 70s, but airbags make 9 and 3 safer placement in modern cars. :)


End file.
